TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) showed that powerful storms in Vongfong's eye wall were producing very heavy rainfall. TRMM's Microwave Imager (TMI) show that multiple rain bands spiraling into Vongfong were also dropping rain over a large area.

On Oct. 8 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), Vongfong had maximum sustained winds near 145 knots (167 mph/268.5 kph) making it a Category 5 Super Typhoon on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. It was centered near 18.7 north and 130.7 east.

It was centered about 510 nautical miles (586 miles/944.5 kph) south-southeast of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. Vongfong was moving to the north at 7 knots (8 mph/13 kph). It was creating extremely rough seas in the Philippine Sea, with wave heights to 50 feet (15.2 meters).

According to the U.S. Kadena Airbase, on Oct. 8, a combined Japanese-U.S. Air Force rescue team recovered the body of the third Airman who had been swept out to sea on Oct. 5 from Typhoon Phanfone.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center predicts that Vongfong is predicted to weaken slightly while moving toward the islands of southern Japan.

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Applied Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have succeeded in switching on a current with a desired direction in graphene using a single laser pulse within a femtosecond ¬¬ – a femtosecond corresponds to the millionth part of a billionth of a second. This is more than a thousand times faster compared to the most efficient transistors today.

At the productronica trade fair in Munich this November, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT will be presenting Laser-Based Tape-Automated Bonding, LaserTAB for short. The experts from Aachen will be demonstrating how new battery cells and power electronics can be micro-welded more efficiently and precisely than ever before thanks to new optics and robot support.

Fraunhofer ILT from Aachen relies on a clever combination of robotics and a laser scanner with new optics as well as process monitoring, which it has developed...

Plants and algae use the enzyme Rubisco to fix carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass. Algae have figured out a way to increase the efficiency of carbon fixation. They gather most of their Rubisco into a ball-shaped microcompartment called the pyrenoid, which they flood with a high local concentration of carbon dioxide. A team of scientists at Princeton University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University and the Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry have unravelled the mysteries of how the pyrenoid is assembled. These insights can help to engineer crops that remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing more food.

Our brains house extremely complex neuronal circuits, whose detailed structures are still largely unknown. This is especially true for the so-called cerebral cortex of mammals, where among other things vision, thoughts or spatial orientation are being computed. Here the rules by which nerve cells are connected to each other are only partly understood. A team of scientists around Moritz Helmstaedter at the Frankfiurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Helene Schmidt (Humboldt University in Berlin) have now discovered a surprisingly precise nerve cell connectivity pattern in the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for orienting the individual animal or human in space.